Capitalism > Forced Multiculturalism
Please stop trying to jump on the “there is no right or wrong, only feelings”, “nothing is superior to anything else”, “the patriarchy/xyz is holding you back”, “property rights are abstract” bandwagon. It’s disgusting.
Multiculturalism done right: walk into a Japanese restaurant in Morgantown, WV and find them playing Japanese TV, bookcases covering the walls with Manga and DVDs, and people trying to communicate to me in broken English and Japanese.
The food was amazing!
Grandparents Say the Darnedest Things
- Me: It’s really hard to find a job these days
- Grandmother: Just paint your face black
- Me: ….
I saw this cover in my sister’s apartment today and I started to laugh. I find it amusing when people ask ‘If people are trying to find so much oil and oil companies are paying people in Kansas money to drill, why are prices so damn high?’
The issue is that supply responds to prices. Supply is a function of prices. Many people assume prices are a function of supply. I can understand the confusion.
You see, in principles of economics people are taught the quip ‘Output determines prices’ and it sticks. Intuitively it makes sense: the more there is of supply the less scarce it’ll be and the cheaper its price will be. On the intuitive level it makes sense to wonder ‘Well, if there is an oil boom and people are trying to find all this oil, why are prices so high? I thought that quantity produced determines prices!’ Well, it’s actually supply and demand that determines prices.
On top of forgetting that it’s the interaction of supply and demand determining price many people also forget that there are many other factors which determine the price of oil. Specifically we need to look at the shifters of supply and in this context we need to look at prices and technology. As prices of gasoline increase supply will shift right but simultaneously supply is being affected by the increased cost of drilling. You see, as prices increase it becomes profitable to extract more costly oil. The net effect is ambigous: prices could increase, decrease, or remain unchanged.
Why are prices are sky high is a very difficult question to answer. However, arguing that they shouldn’t be because there is an oil boom is to not understand economics at all. It is completely natural to expect an oil boom when prices are high.
Utopia
The liberal utopia and the conservative utopia are not that dissimilar.
Both utopias have a strong government that legislates morality, imposes prohibitions on human autonomy and keeps man subservient to the state.
Only a libertarian worldview (either right-libertarian or left-libertarian) increases human autonomy, keeps man subservient to himself and doesn’t legislate morality.
No matter how you define it any system of governance is based on morality. The reason a system of governance is necessary is to specify and regulate right and wrong, good and bad.
Even in an AnCap world the philosophy is rooted in the idea that good is provided by businesses and will be regulated by consumers voting with their money. There is still morality and still right and wrong. It is wrong for a company to produce unsatisfactory products because it will loose money compared to companies which produce satisfactory products. The morality implicit is that if businesses want to make money the good (right) way for them to do that is to provide consumer with the best products possible while the wrong (bad) way is using government or a third party to coercively obtain wealth. Just as the moral thing for customers to do when confronted with an unsatisfactory product is to not purchase the product and tell their friends and family that their experience was poor so as to signal to the business through loss of revenue and profit that they are not satisfying consumer demand as opposed to using a third party to regulate and force their demands on businesses.
While you are right that in the AnCap world there is no legislated morality, I’d argue that morality in this world is Law as defined by Hayek. This is exactly what many Austrian Economists mean when they talk about the difference between Law and Legislation. For an AnCap society to function social mores must accept the moral principles of a free market and classical liberalism and the only way they can accept that is if they become de facto Law.
libertarians-and-stoya asked: Can you explain what Say's law is?
There are many different versions of Say’s Law.
Say original stated: “[…] products are paid for by products.” By this he meant “Money performs no more than the role of a conduit in this double exchange. When the exchanges have been completed, it will be found that one has paid for products with products.” What Say original meant was basically money is a medium of exchange and that money represents real goods. Money is not a nominal variable but a real variable and only functions as a means to facilitate transitions. The idea being that once I sell a product I will immediately use that money and purchase another product.
Imagine a barter economy in which goods are directly transacted for other goods. There is an immediate one-to-one relationship between what I get and what I spend. I gave you an iPhone in exchange for a PSP. Even with money I use the money I get from selling you an iPhone to buy a PSP and another good. So, me supplying an iPhone and selling it provides me with money to buy other products or provides me with other products in a barter economy.
Keynes reformulated the law when he said “The classical economists have taught that supply creates it own demand, meaning by this in some significant, but not clearly defined, sense that the whole of the costs of production must necessarily be spent in the aggregate, directly or indirectly, on purchasing the product.” Keynes was getting at the idea that money is a nominal variable and is a good itself.
Imagine an economy in which goods are sold for an intermediary good called money. There is an indirect relationship between goods now through relative prices. I now sell an iPhone for $500 and buy a PSP for $300. In the Keynesian world it doesn’t immediately follow that goods exchange directly for other goods since in the world with money I now have $200 which I can save or spend on other goods. This is the crux of Keynes’ refutation of classical economics: people can hoard money.
In a classical world it is kind of impossible to ‘hoard’ money. You could hoard real items such as iPhones but eventually you must trade them for other goods: a recession cannot last forever in a classical world since you must trade goods for other goods. Without trading goods for other goods you could gain nothing.
In a Keynesian world you can in fact hoard money. You can never spend money and since money is the medium of exchange so long as money is never spent no items are ever bought or sold and a recession can last indefinitely as long as there is no spending (i.e hoarding money).
The issue is what happens when there is a sudden increase in people’s desire to hold money? This is what Keynes called the ‘Animal Spirits’. He basically says ‘Okay, let’s assume that people randomly decide to sit on money and not buy products, what happens?’ Well, to Keynes he said ‘This means that aggregate demand will fall, people will lose their jobs, and people will hoard even more money!’ He called it the Paradox of Thrift and is the reason why Keynesians fear deflation. They fear that a downward adjustment of prices will result in more hoarding of money and a further download adjustment of prices. Austrians basically say ‘Okay… Prices adjust downward, why is this bad? It’s basic supply and demand dumb ass!’ Keynesians retort ‘Well, the downward adjustment process could take months, years, even decades. Prices can be sticky!’ To which Austrians basically say ‘Okay…. What’s your point?’ And Keynesians say ‘Well, since prices are sticky downward and since the problem is a reduction in aggregate demand, then the entire problem of a recession can be resolved if a third party (Government) picks up the slack.’ Austrians say ‘And, where will you get the money for this?’ and Keynesians say ‘Deficits… We’ll worry about repaying the debt from preventing a recession when the economy is booming!’
JH: I have to ask if you’re constantly banging your head against the table. Everything you write in the book strikes me as so much common sense, and yet even Democrats say the government has to pull in spending when families do. Isn’t that the reverse of the truth? Isn’t it the fact that when families are tightening their belts the government needs to loosen its belt to make up for that loss of demand?
PK: That’s right. The whole mistake that people make is that we’re all like a family. We’re not because we’re interdependent. Your spending is my income and my spending is your income. If we both tighten our belts at the same time thinking that’s going to make us better off, it actually makes us worse off. This is a fundamental fallacy.
I’m not going to complain about being me. I’ve got a good job. I’ve got a solid income. It is frustrating, but it’s frustrating because there are 4 million Americans who have been out of work for more than a year. There’s a whole generation of students who are graduating who can’t find jobs, or can’t find jobs that are making use of the education that they’ve acquired at great expense. Those are the people to be concerned about.
Krugman is basically arguing that Say’s law breaks down during a recession as a result of the Paradox of Thrift. Krugman’s implicit argument is that in order to compensate for this Paradox of Thrift that Government must spend. In essence Krugman is saying that savings is bad and that spending is good and that when aggregate demand falls it is up to Government to spend.
This is a typical Keynesian argument and is an oversimplification of pretty much every issue. It seems pretty intuitive but when one stops to think about it it defies all economic logic. Krugman isn’t arguing Economics, he’s arguing based on circular logic:
If Person A stops spending money then Person B will see a reduction in income and Person B will stop spending then Person C will see a reduction in income and Person C will stop spending then Person D will see a reduction in income and Person D will stop spending then…. Ad Infinitum until we start the process back at Person A.
In a few recent blog posts, Paul Krugman used bar graphs and tables to (allegedly) prove the superiority of his views over those of the Austrians. Yet, as I’ll show in this article, I can use Krugman’s own data to demonstrate the exact opposite.
Very interesting conclusion: human rate of growth will peak at two children per couple with a total world population of ten billion.
New York Banning Anonymous Speech
Well, this is scary to say the least….
21 2. A WEB SITE ADMINISTRATOR UPON REQUEST SHALL REMOVE ANY COMMENTS
22 POSTED ON HIS OR HER WEB SITE BY AN ANONYMOUS POSTER UNLESS SUCH ANONY-
23 MOUS POSTER AGREES TO ATTACH HIS OR HER NAME TO THE POST AND CONFIRMS
24 THAT HIS OR HER IP ADDRESS, LEGAL NAME, AND HOME ADDRESS ARE ACCURATE.
25 ALL WEB SITE ADMINISTRATORS SHALL HAVE A CONTACT NUMBER OR E-MAIL
26 ADDRESS POSTED FOR SUCH REMOVAL REQUESTS, CLEARLY VISIBLE IN ANY
27 SECTIONS WHERE COMMENTS ARE POSTED.
Cell Tower Deaths
High death rates among climbers are caused in part by demanding project deadlines, which lead some climbers to cut corners on safety equipment or to “free climb,” a dangerous practice in which the climber is not attached to the tower. Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) regulations prohibit free climbing, yet it was involved in about half of the fatalities FRONTLINE and ProPublica examined.
FRONTLINE reveals that the major cell phone companies are shielded from accountability in the deaths by relying on layers of subcontracting to carry out the tower work. Subcontracting drives costs down and makes it difficult for the government to discipline the major cell carriers. “Just through their own policy they layer themselves away from it,” say Randy Gray, a former OSHA inspector.
“Legally, there’s no way we can really get to that company,” says Jordan Barab, deputy assistant secretary of labor for OSHA. “Our problem in this industry is that you have these little contractors that may set off in their pickup truck, you know, … and may never have any contact, face-to-face contact, with their contractors.”
[…]
Corporate giants have outsourced the dangerous work of building and maintaining communications towers to tiny subcontracting companies. Over the last nine years, nearly 100 workers have died, 50 of them on cell sites.
[…]
Tower climbing, an obscure field with no more than 10,000 workers, has a death rate roughly 10 times that of construction. In the last nine years, nearly 100 tower climbers have been killed on the job. More than half of them were working on cell sites.
So, that equates to a roughly one percent chance of dying on job per year. Now, as any economist knows there are tradeoffs to everything. So, what does a one percent chance of death per year get you? Well, considering a high school graduate earns approximately $38,000 and a cell phone technician earns about $55,000 with only a high school degree it’s obviously a nice pay premium.
God bless those people.
